[ExI] riots again

Mirco Romanato painlord2k at libero.it
Fri Sep 28 13:59:46 UTC 2012


Il 28/09/2012 02:07, Keith Henson ha scritto:

> I think it is worth considering where all religions came from in the
> first place.  They are, near as I can see every one of them,
> xenophobic memes.   And the reason they thrive in human minds is due
> to the same mechanisms that have caused wars for the last few
> million years.

I don't think so.

My take is religions are useful to bind people together and allow much
more cooperation. It is like standardization of behaviors. If I belong
to a community with a definite set of officially shared memes I'm able
to plan my activities with a larger degree of safety.
Different standards/religions could coexist, if they share some subset
of fundamental memes allowing them to coexist.

Cooperation is a tremendous asset when there is an external threat, not
only because people go together against their shared threat, but because
they will help each other to endure the threat. But the threat need not
to be some human, just an harsh ecosystem, a dangerous job, etc.


> That's more or less true today, but any religion can be used as an
> excuse to kill unbelievers and will be if the population is under
> "bleak future" stress.

Anything can be used as an reason to kill. I know of mothers killing
their children to protect them from the pain to become adults.


> If you need examples, I can certainly proved plenty of them.  But if
> you want to figure this out yourself, tell me why the IRA is much
> less of a problem today.

Because the Catholics (Irish) see no reason to fight, as demography is 
on their side. Protestants (Scot-English) see no reason to fight because 
demography is not on their side and fighting would make thing worse 
faster. Both Churches hierarchies are against fighting for ideological 
reasons. The main thing to worry about is, for both, the economy and the 
lack of jobs. Fighting would make things worse.

In Italy we had a decade of terrorism. At the end, all the troubles of a 
decade could be ascribed to just around 4-500 terrorist full time (this 
is all of them, left-right and center) and something 4-5.000 supporters. 
Italy had  around 50 M inhabitants at the time. So, when the times 
changed, it was easy to suppress them out. In many ways, it is the same 
for IRA. Without external help in the form of money and weapons, their 
ability to perform was severely crippled. The real number of IRA or ETA 
terrorists was always small.

Mirco








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